Freezing transforms

Before I create nCloth, I want to talk a little bit about freezing transforms.Ideally, your nCloth objects should have Scales of 1, 1, 1, and that's prettymuch the case for all objects in Maya.If you've used the Scale tool, and changed the scale of your objects -- maybe Idecided I didn't want it to be quite so large; maybe about 1 meter on a side,rather than 2 meters -- then I could scale these both down to a value of 0.5.If I do that, then the best practice is to freeze the transforms.

As you probably know, freezing transforms will restore these values to 0.In other words, whatever the current values are, those become the new 0,and whatever the current Scale values are, those get reset to 1, or frozen to a value of 1.Here we go; Modify > Freeze Transformations.I can go into the Option box for that.You can see I can choose to freeze any one of the transforms.I am going to do all three, and click Freeze Transform.

Now when I select either one of these, you will see that we've got Translate andRotate values of 0, and Scale values of 1.This is really helpful, not just to prevent any possible issues with thedynamics, but also so that we can always get these objects back to thestarting positions.If we've moved them around, or done strange things to them, we can alwaysget them back to where they were by simply just setting all their Translateand Rotate values to 0. Simple enough!It's just a best practice to always freeze the transform before creatinga dynamic simulation.

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Released

11/30/2012

Take an in-depth look at nCloth, the Maya toolkit for simulating high-resolution mesh cloth for 3D characters and animations. Author Aaron F. Ross explains the roles played by the various "actors" in an nCloth simulation, including the nucleus solver, nCloth objects, passive colliders, and nConstraints. The course begins with basic simulations such as flags and ropes, then progresses to building a simple garment, until finally integrating animation and special effects like falling leaves and tearing cloth. Aaron also covers performance optimization techniques such as nCloth and nucleus solver settings, proxy objects, collision layers, the Wrap deformer, and more.